The humorists at the Harvard Lampoon are taking aim at klutzy girls and sparkly vampires with their …
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Recently, I conducted back-to-back readings of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and the Harvard Lampoon's Nightlight. I was curious: Would the parody deconstruct the original with biting wit, until all that was left was emperor-style nudity? Or would Meyer's kajillion-selling novel brush away the satirists like horseflies, and stand on its own merits?

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Below, some findings. The uninitiated should know that spoilers for both novels lie ahead. (In the interest of transparency, I ought to note that I know one of the authors on the Harvard Lampoon staff, though I have no idea which parts of Nightlight she had a hand in writing.)

Plot-Per-Page Ratio

Twilight is 498 pages long and contains approximately three events. There's a car crash that almost happens, and an exposition-heavy showdown in a dance studio. Also, some vampires play baseball. Reading Twilight with an eye for plot markers is a bit like driving through rural flatland with the radio on: every now and then you'll hear a snatch of something interesting, but for the most part it's just static.

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Nightlight is only 154 pages, and manages to squeeze in a cockeyed version of almost everything that happens in Twilight, plus a blood-soaked prom and a scene where a vampire menaces a young couple in a graveyard. Advantage: Nightlight.

Characters

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After spending five hundred pages in the company of Twilight protagonists Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, here's what I know about them: Bella is clumsy and prefers bookstores to dress shopping. Edward is handsome, and attractive. Lest you think he's one-dimensional, though, Meyer is careful to note that he's very easy on the eyes.

Nightlight offers parody counterparts Belle Goose and Edwart Mullen. Written less as characters than joke-clotheslines, these two are nevertheless more memorable than Meyer's swoony couple. Belle may be delusional, but she's also headstrong and sure of her own personal magnetism, a distinct improvement over passive, self-doubting Bella. And Edwart Mullen isn't actually a vampire — he's an undersocialized gamer with pronounced hypochondria. But he's not prone to inscrutable smirking or blink-and-you'll-miss-it mood shifts, like some immortals we could name.

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Prose Style

Only you will know whether you want to read 498 pages of Stephenie Meyer's dialogue-attribution verbs. Lines are "said" and "asked," but they're also "encouraged," "warned," "admitted," "breathed," "nodded," "urged," "gasped" and "coaxed." This isn't the only thing that matters about a work of fiction, of course, but it's such a basic point that it's worrisome when an author can't get it right.

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Not every joke in Nightlight hits its mark, but the dialogue tags are knocked down early and brilliantly. From page 11:

"So what's Phoenix like?" he beseeched.

With one word, the authors of Nightlight show they're paying more attention to what they're writing than Stephenie Meyer does in the course of a novel.